 We operate out of the premise that the practice of contemporary art conservation has long extended beyond material analysis. We needed to look beyond the physicality of an artwork or a conservator's dogma of minimal intervention and reversibility. To meet the complex demands inherent to contemporary works of art, to ensure its care and survival, we have shifted towards preserving a works concept, aesthetic function, and the artist's intention. We have recognized the multiplicity of perception among stakeholders around and within one work of art. Therefore, conservators now routinely interact with artists, assistants, fabricators, estates, curators, administrators, and experts from other fields to identify and weigh the various values inherent to a particular work and to negotiate the most suitable conservation treatment in every case anew. Such broader spheres of interaction, decision-making, and possibility of intervention requires an increased sensibility as mediators in communication with our stakeholders. Our roles are changing. Our apparent growth, growing scope of action and visibility within the system of art preservation and presentation enhances both our influence and thereby our responsibility. These changes include an adapted set of skills, specific knowledge, and sensitivity not regularly associated with traditional modes of conservation. One of the premises of why CAN was started is to bring focus to this change in real time. Concurrently, we have also been making suggestions to the ongoing debate within the membership designation working group to hopefully reflect some of this evolution we are experiencing. This panel brings together conservators and researchers who are initiating, experiencing, and examining these processes to explore the evolving influence a conservator may enact when caring for contemporary art either consciously or unconsciously. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome our panelists and Marika Openya, Associate Conservator at Contemporary Conservation and Program Chair of CAN, who will serve as our moderator today. Hello, everybody, and thank you, Luca, for this introduction on behalf of CAN. I would like to thank the AIC board for giving room to a new network, and thank you specifically to Ruth Saylor and Suzanne Davis for providing an extra time slot at this annual meeting for a panel to speak with the AIC membership on the intention of this new network, the contemporary art network, CAN. Before we begin with the presentation of our four panelists, I would like to use this moment to introduce you to how the panel is framed because it reflects both the topic of the session, the evolving influence of the conservator, and the reason why we believe a deeper investigation around the care of contemporary art is important to be considered within the conservation profession. Traditionally, conservation deals with works from the past, that is works that have been assigned their place in history, culturally, socially, or art historically, and we agree to varying degrees of professional interests, emphasis, or nerdiness, on the fact that sometime in the past, a significance of a work was, a significance of a work within the canon of historical development of humanity was determined. At least we know that whatever artwork in front of us needs preservation is also worthy of it. It is common that in these cases, the artist and or their hairs are long gone and the belonging is attributed somewhere around the society and cultural canon, be it Western, Asian, indigenous, or even multicultural. And though contemporary art is known for the often experimental character of materials and concepts or of its vastly developing new forms beyond sculpture and painting, like time-based media or performance, we have begun to investigate these special forms of contemporary art to meet their needs and ensure their survival. Most significant, in my opinion, however, no matter how traditional or innovative the form is the presence of the artist or their hairs or their advocates. This historical closeness to our own time can shrink to a degree where the distance between the time of creation and the moment of preservation become one in the same or even overlap. This closeness can result in an immediacy that leaves conservators of contemporary art struggled between their ethical guidelines of preserving a work for a larger society by staying neutral, scientific, and objective. Our codes of ethics request a prohibition of creative conservation or intervention with the artist's creative process. And yet, not only by the presence of the artist, but also by the paradox of especially contemporary art aging quickly and by the subjectivity of all involved stakeholders and circumstantially influenced situations, we often find ourselves balancing between two poles, the neutrality and rigor of conservation and the volatility of circumstances at hand that ask for creative negotiation or, like Claudine has called it yesterday, the creative destruction of brokenness. Today we would like to discuss among each other and later with you, the audience, the influence by and the influences on the conservator during negotiation processes to assess conservation strategies. What I mean is, for example, how the material knowledge of the conservator is so specific, it often receives high interest from artists by their questions and our responses. We may influence the choice between one or the other way to get to a desired appearance or performance. Or the same material expertise allows us to read physical conditions on an artwork that are invisible to other stakeholders. I am certain everyone in this room remembers occasions where the conservator needs to decide to how to communicate this that is invisible to others or if to communicate it at all because it may turn around the entire focus of a given discussion. Or our knowledge is recognized internally during the discussion, but for political reasons needs to remain hidden to the wider public. We have quite a bit of time for Q&A as part of the session during which we hope to hear comments and questions from you on the topic, particularly those who are familiar with conservation for the private sector, the art market, collectors, galleries, and auction houses. But for now, let me introduce our panelists today. We will begin with Marta Garcia-Selma who is a PhD researcher under the EU program NACA, New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art. With a BA in MA in Photography and an MA in Paper Conservation, Marta specializes on conservation of photographic materials and contemporary works of art. She will present to us an outline of her stakeholder theory as a framework to later discuss social structures and the dynamics by which we make decisions. Followed by Miroslav Vachovic, a painting conservator, PhD of conservation science and associate professor in the Department of Conservation of Modern and Contemporary Art and Deputy Dean of the Nicholas Copernicus University in Turun. He will present his experience with filmmaker and artist David Lynch that will provide a platform to frame the negotiation between ethical conservation guidelines and the need to adapt. We will then be able to listen to Alex, a Sherman Fairchild Foundation Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since 2017, she has helped photograph conservator Nora Kennedy build a program for the preservation and display of time-based media artworks in the collection and will present this today. Later, during the actual panel discussion, Nora Kennedy and Glenn Wharton will take her seat and be available to us to speak about institutional infrastructure and conservation rising through the ranks and thereby gaining influence, visibility, and responsibility. Finally, Zoe Miller, who is an interdisciplinary researcher based in London, she holds degrees in art, law, museum studies and is currently completing her PhD at Tate as part of NACA as well. She will take the conversation into the epistemic dimension and will discuss practitioner invisibility that seems to traditionally surround the conservation profession. All in all, this panel is supposed to address and to reflect on us as professionals in a discipline of caring for contemporary art, but I wholeheartedly believe so. The topic discussed should feel equally familiar to conservators invested in their care and survival of more traditional forms of art as well, we all navigate in the same moment, no matter how old they are and that is today, in today's social structure around our cultural heritage. And with this said, I would like to welcome Marta, our first speaker, please. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Marike, that was a perfect introduction and I think that it follows really well with yesterday's presentation. So, contemporary artworks are extremely buried to inform medium and intent. Some contemporary pieces already present unexpected and unknown changes and others challenge the traditional standards we have for museums collection care. As such, in order to be maintained alive, some artworks have to go through non-traditional approaches during exhibition, preservation or conservation. And as we saw in yesterday's presentations, those process require a large network of stakeholders. The 1999 decision-making model for the conservation of modern and contemporary art was presented as a tool to help conservators on those instances. The model provides an structure to lead conversations, to organize the decision-making, to revisit existing decisions with new light and to present issues and justifications of the conservation decision-making process. As Julia Gibbler presented yesterday, during the last years, this model has been revisited in regards to a potential extension considering different aspects. Among them, to acknowledge subjectivity in decision-making by defining the initial aim, individual circumstances and conditions as well as the stakeholders and their interests. Also, by including the dynamics in the process of deciding. So, what I present here connect with these two points and attempts to help tackling the questions. Who are or should be the stakeholders involved in the conservation process? And what is or should be the relevance of their involvement? A stakeholder theory could be used as the starting point for identifying relevant stakeholders on the conservation of contemporary artworks. The basic idea in the identification of relevant stakeholders is simple. If by taking the viewpoint of senior management, our view was that if a person, group or thing could affect or be affected by the conservation approach, then managers should worry about that person, group or thing. The idea of the management of those stakeholders is a little bit more complicated and it varies exponentially according to the framework in which it's developed. Nonetheless, by putting together different theories used to develop stakeholder systems, cultural heritage evaluation models and conservation of contemporary art, I formulated a categorization system to help us figure out the relationships and relevance on the identified stakeholders. So, there we go. As presented here, I categorize stakeholders in four groups regarding their natural form and their involvement with the conservation process. The first group, human actors actively involved are human beings who have unacted voice on the conservation decision-making process. For example, if we look into yesterday's presentations, we can see that in the case presented by Matthew Skopec, the artists acted as a key actively involved human estate holder because they had unacted voice on matters of display, which might collide with the advice given by the conservator while following museum standards. Or in the case, Thomas Hirschhorn's intensive station as mentioned by Nina, the artist and his studio, the curator, the conservator and the museum technicians actively collaborated in what we could call the co-production of the artwork at the museum. The second group, human actors passively involved, are human beings who are affected by the conservation outcome but do not have unacted voice in the conservation process. If we look into the case, Katie Patterson's future library presented by Brian Castriota, we can see that the peers can be perceived as a century-long public artwork in which the human beings who enact the annual ceremony every year, the future writers who might not be even born yet and the future readers can also be considered as key estate holders of the artwork. The third group, non-human actors actively involved are non-human aspects which play an active role and contribute to the outcome of the conservation process because of their affordances or connections to other subjects and or objects. In this case, I often think about technological aspects or the obsolescence of material and technology but looking into the cases presented yesterday, I have to mention the pieces and Hamilton's Palimstead and Ronnie Horns and Sfar presented by Pamela Johnson. Those artworks were fully dependent of life as nail and thousand ants. Thereby, we could see that the animals could be considered as non-human actors actively involved, which in this case, require connection to others such as entomologists or soil specialists. And the fourth and last group, non-human actors passively involved are non-human aspects which play a passive role and can be seen as the backbone of the conservation process. On the cases presented by Matthew, we could find Museum Skylands for display or in the case Intensive Station, we could refer to the material precarcity of the piece which is a key piece aspect of the artwork's concept. In the case Future Library, we could perhaps think about environmental conditions allowing the thousand trees to keep growing for the next hundred years. And in the case presented by Pamela, we could regard the US government protocols followed when working with animals considered as invasive species. Of course, as we just saw, every artwork due to its uniqueness and to its distinct sociocultural framework will result in different identifications and categorizations. In addition, after talking to some of you working in private conservation yesterday, I attempt to include a different set of stakeholders into the chart, but probably you are much more aware and smart of me in that area. But following this, after the categorization, a main question will remain. How do we make sure we find all the right relevant stakeholders and their information? The perspective on systems approach presented by philosopher Bernard Ulrich could be useful in this case. Ulrich's approach comes from the strands of practical philosophy underpin critical system heuristics and it introduced a space for reflected practice based on systemic thinking and practicing the domain of social human activity. It focuses primarily on two things. First, it emphasizes orientations towards practical rather than theoretical goals, what fits perfectly with our cases. Secondly, it observes the role of an analyst as the agent of change, not as a passive observer. In our case, the analyst could be the conservator who by collecting, analyzing and filtering information related to the artwork with a conservation perspective will behave as the agent of change. If we think about this, we could relate it to a premise presented yesterday by Muriel defending the conservator as the collectors of the artwork's effect. So, what Ulrich proposed is a framework to encourage reflection through a list of 12 boundary questions used to provoke and define situational framings. In my research, I reshaped those questions to fit with our conservation context. The questions are the ones you can see in the screen right now. But due to a limited time of this presentation, I will not have time to get into each of them. Nonetheless, I will read to you a couple of the answers I collected through interviews I carried out while retrospectively researching the conservation of a contemporary final photograph which was reproduced as a conservation strategy. When asking the artist's photographer, what or who was assumed to be the guarantor of success? That is, where or on whom did those involved in the conservation process seek some guarantee that the expected improvement will be achieved? The artist answered, and I sighed. In the printing lab, I saw the print and then I rely on the craft and mounting. And then I rely upon the quality of my framework. I mean, that is also very important because there are very few people who can do what my framework can do, end of quote. That answer is what directed me to meet the framework and to collect unique information on the development of the framing system used for that particular artwork. When asking the museum's curator, who was witness to the interest of those affected but not involved in the conservation reproduction process? That is, who argue the case of those stakeholders who could not speak from themselves? The curator answered, and I sighed. The museum's director is the representative of the Ministry of Culture. And the Ministry of Culture is representative of the people of the region. So the public was involved, impersonated by the Ministry of Culture, impersonated by the director, impersonated by the curator, and so on, end of quote. So with that answers, the curator acknowledged the public as a human actor passively involved. To sum up, this year presented has to be looked as an early attempt at developing a stakeholder identification and categorization model to support the exhibition, preservation, and conservation of contemporary artworks. It could allow us to identify the relevance, effect, and impact of different stakeholders on the conservation process, as well as to recognize how stakeholders are affected by it. To a critical heuristic system questionnaire performed with different stakeholders, I believe we could collect valuable information about additional actors who should be considered as relevant. Besides, the four stakeholders group could help to categorize human and non-human actors according to relevance and their involvement into a conservation process, and could direct us to someone who could speak on behalf of the non-human participants. In addition, this process could open new areas of communication allowing the analysts, the conservator, to build trustworthy collaborations with the stakeholders, to collect information on the actors' boundaries, expectations, judgments, and interests, and indirectly on other areas related to the artworks, biography, and anatomy. And as a final note, I would like to say that I'm hoping the ideas proposed in this paper are of interest for the people in this room, and you will be willing to discuss it and to reshape them further. Thank you very much to everyone, especially to the NACA team and to the Khan group. Thank you. Hello, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. I hope to respond to some theoretical issues showing case study. The great exhibition of David Lynch works in the center of contemporary art in Torun, Koka, was a trigger for the Artist Conservatory Corporation. Outer wished to repair his work by himself with the assistance of conservator. Prepared reports, requests... Prepared conditional reports and requests to exclude fungi-contaminated pubs anti-gravity factory painting from the show made artists to check his work... his work's condition by himself. The artist's intervention with the conservator's assistance was yet into another painting, Rock with Seven Eyes. Outer wanted to attach raised edges of lurch flake or thick layer of lacquer using common two-agreedians epoxy glue. Numerous doubts of conservator were expressed, yet they were summarized with the words of artists. You wouldn't do it. I know, but I can. As it was a part of the creation process within the artist's repair, conservator did not refuse to assess the artist, gaining, in the same time, opportunity to communicate alternative ways of treatment. And possibility of recognition of the artist's creative process, materials, his view on restoration of his works. It was revealed how important for him was to mat over the surface of applied glue in order to stimulate the degree of gloss. First meeting was satisfying for the artist. He also led the conservator to make tiny in paintings of two lacqueners that become more visible after the treatment. Yet operation did not change the attitude of the artist to not reverse the risky adhesive. Though it resulted in the decision about artist's treatment of another painting, Bob sees himself walking toward formidable abstraction. Once again, with the assistance of conservator. Consolidating adhesive used by Lynch for stabilization of the flaking paint layer in this picture was a common polyvinyl acetate-based Carpenter's glue diluted in water. It was exactly the same one as used by him before in the States. As it would be implemented anyway, conservator once again agreed to assist artists in the repair process, hoping to shift it closer to the conservation standards. Remarks expressed on the risk of application of water in the glue solution and shrinkage while trying revealed that the eager of Lynch to get special texture of the surface was much more important than the stabilization of the flakes. Importantly, artists applied it in a distinguished way, omitting other parts. Standard attachment of individual flakes with the fish glue instead of wetting and coating all the surface would be fair enough. What was of extremely value yet was the possibility to talk. Artists confirmed that it was not the first time he did the procedure, probably responsible for whitish stains on the surface. Additionally, seek for the velvety but not too glossy texture was expressed. Possibility of mixing varnishes in order to achieve subtle variations suggested by conservator gave great artist interest. Lynch waited to check the result after drying. And when the conservator was already absent, he applied partially the solution also on the impasto fragments of another painting, Bob's Antigravity Factory. On the next day, artists called from the airport to check whether it looks good, not if the flakes were stabilized. During the treatment, he also revealed partially the nature of the main paint material, calling it tile glue, and indicated that it was mixed by him with oil colors. Thanks to the trust of David Lynch, gained during the meetings and discussion, another painting, Bob's Antigravity Factory, could have been treated by conservator without artists, and in this time following conservation code of ethics. The main material was causing extreme difficulties during conservation, the one mentioned as tile glue. In further email exchange, the non-traditional paint was named by artist. Tyler, 2008, industrial adhesive used for gluing carpets and based on synthetic rubbers. The other material was alkyd lacquer for outdoor garden furniture coatings of McCloskey Company used as varnish on top of it. Extraordinary materials needed modified methods of disinfection of the fungi-contaminated painting, Bob's Antigravity Factory. The surface was very sensitive to solvents or even vapors of solvents. That's why this infection was done only fragmentary in the exact points of fungi present. Cleaning was based on modification of pH and conductivity of the tested water solutions. White-ish efflorescence was removed with cyclomethicon D5. Another emails related to the condition of the works and numerous surface coatings, they were concerned about these coatings. Artists claimed not to use varnishes or high temperature to achieve special effects even though they were obviously visible on his works. Also flaking and cracking was prescribed by him to natural result of aging. The paintings indicated conscious operations of the outdoor. Some flakes were painted over with color already being with raised edges. Artists made lacuna in cracked paint by himself and attached flakes in upside down position, covering them with another coatings. On all the photographs, all the photographs are showing flakes which they were already done soon after completion, yet artists resisted to confirm that. Further email communication resulted in decision to continue to restore according to conservation standards two paintings, the one treated before on the beginning of cooperation of artists and conservators. Finally, artists gave permission for sampling and further examination. Moreover, artists shared a sample of Tyler Adhesift, used as paint, the material that has already become obsolete at the moment. Close to the end of exhibition, artists expressed his will for another four paintings to be treated by conservator before the transport. Lynch wanted to restore to cover them with his outdoors mixture of carpenter's glue. He was persuaded by conservator to just touch individual flakes with the fish glue, fill and paint few lacuna with reversible paint and do overall treatment with the semi-gloss acrylic varnishing by spraying. Another steps of email communication were done preparing little exhibition and publication on the conservator's activity in the presence of the artist undertaken at Koka. The conservator wrote that instead of artist's claim, it was his will to have cracked and burnt surfaces and various coatings on top. Yet the book and the research got enthusiasm of the artist. It confirmed nature of Adhesift used as a paint layer and led identification of farther materials. But the last accord of this mutual interaction was the visit that took place just last week being preceded by email questions. Artists finally admitted to use blowtorch and different coatings on top of the paint layer and turpentine for thinning. He still resisted on the crack creation suggesting its natural source of aging. Moreover, on the final visit in the Lynch Studio, set of samples of another materials were prepared for the research and artist express his will to continue conservation treatments with full trust to restore understanding his works and artist will not to lose their proper surface texture. Recognition of non-typical materials and of texture value enabled proper conservation treatment designing. It would not be possible without the communication during the very first controversial treatments and trust built upon respect and honesty of both sides with an undertaken dialogue. Communication seems to be very first, extremely important and necessary tool while intervening into the work of the living artist. Summarizing we can ask, who cast a shadow on who or rather who led the light to spot onto the following continuously uncovered fields? Sometimes conservator or an artist, often the other way round. Maybe they both cast a shadow or spot the light together on the treated wall and according to the angle of the stream of light and its evolutionary continuous movement slightly changing and hopefully multiwally broadening point of view. It shall be compared to long lasting dance, not ending with death of the artist. His idea preserved in the work demands further and fatigue and ontologically dynamic care to give other stakeholders the invitation to participate. Thank you for your attention and possibility to be here with you. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was established in 1870 in New York City. The museum features an encyclopedic collection ranging as time span of 300 millennia with art from all geographic regions. And here we go. Here are some representations of artworks in the Met's collection, these are not to scale. The museum boasts a staff of nearly 100 conservators in all areas of specialization with the exception of time-based media conservation. In comparison to other Met collections, the time-based media holdings are quite small. For example, there are over 90,000 photographs in the collection, but only 274 in time-based media. However, when you look at the risks associated with time-based media artworks, they're very high in proportion to the relative size of our collection. And this risk is due to technological obsolescence, the potential for digital corruption and variability in the ways which they can be displayed. Care of these artworks can be much more time consuming than other traditional media. In recent years as well, the number of time-based media acquisitions has taken a sharp upward curve. And here's a little bit of background as to the museum efforts that have been centered on the care of time-based media to date. In 2001, Met staff, including members from the film and media section of the education department, joined with conservators and curators to create an informal group that was named the Film and Media Support Group. And this group was focused primarily on issues surrounding the preservation and display of archival moving collections, moving image collections, but the group also started to discuss challenges with some of our first time-based media artworks. This support group was the precursor to the Met's time-based media working group, which was established in 2012. This group currently is composed of about 50 members representing a wide range of museum departments, including curators, collection managers, conservators, registrars, members of the legal team and others. The working group holds meetings to update staff about time-based media activities at the museum, hosting lectures and internal workshops, and conducting tours of other museums and organizations. So in this image co-authors Nora Kennedy and Walling Anderson experiment with an augmented reality app during a tour of the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2016, the conservator in charge of photograph conservation, Nora Kennedy, spearheaded a plan for an in-depth time-based media conservation assessment. And this would expand on the high-level survey conducted by Amy Brost in the summer of 2013 during one of her graduate internships. Nora invited Glenn Wharton to help plan the organization and methodology of the assessment. So she'd recognized that his stature as a senior conservator and his experience establishing the time-based media conservation lab at the Museum of Modern Art would carry a lot of weight with upper management at the Met. Glenn, Nora, and the department administrator in Walling Anderson identified several goals for the assessment. These included documenting what the Met has in their own collection holdings and identifying the needs of the collection. The survey would also evaluate the current institutional practices so that the improvements could be recommended. And this information would be collected into a detailed final report. The ultimate goal of the assessment was to advocate for the creation of a formal time-based media conservation program at the Met. Now that the overall plan was formulated, funding had to be sourced to support this initiative. And funding came from two sources, from the NIAS Foundation and also from the director's office. The fact that the director's office contributed funding signaled upper administration's early awareness of and support for this project. Glenn Wharton suggested incorporating interviews of Met staff members into the methodology of the assessment. And this not only helped to gather information about our colleagues' attitudes towards time-based media, but it also increased visibility for the time-based media assessment's goals, therefore fostering institutional buy-in. This proved to be a really winning approach. Ultimately, the assessment team included three contractors, Glenn Wharton, who organized and implemented the survey and conducted staff interviews. And two part-time research assistants. So on the left is Leah Kramer. She's a graduate student from New York University's conservation program. And on the right is Lorena Louriez Lopez, who's a recent graduate of NYU's moving image archiving preservation program. Leah and Lorena conducted an item-by-item survey of the collection, investigating what formats were present in the collection, and noting the documentation and legal agreements that existed for each artwork. Met staff were joined by myself, the Met's first time-based media conservation fellow. My role in the survey was to conduct, was to focus on researching the larger policies in place regarding the acquisition, care, and exhibition of time-based media artworks. I also assisted Molly and Nora in providing oversight to the project and in drafting and editing the final report. It would be difficult to list all of those who provided assistance with the assessment, but a few key staff members included colleagues from the information systems and technology department, collection managers from the department of photographs and modern and contemporary departments, and our colleagues in the digital department. In a very real sense, this was a museum-wide effort. There were four phases of the time-based media assessment. So in phase one, interviews were conducted with time-based media conservators at other institutions. This was to learn more about how they had established the time-based media conservation programs at their institutions, as well as how they currently document and care for their collection. We also asked them about any past surveys that they conducted and whether they had any advice for us. Phase two was an internal review of current forms and policies, including the previously mentioned interviews with 45 staff members at the museum across a wide range of departments. This was a really important step. These interviews were one-on-one and confidential, so individuals could be more open about their experiences. This also provided a safe educational environment to raise awareness for the issues faced in preserving and exhibiting time-based media. Phase three was the item-by-item survey, which resulted in the collection of raw data for the survey statistics. We completed a high-level artwork assessment to flag and prioritize conservation actions for the future. And phase four was the creation of the final report. We distributed the first draft of the report to the primary stakeholders that we had interviewed in phase two and invited their feedback, and then later also incorporated their suggested changes. This was also another essential step in fostering advocacy for the collection. Through this survey, we learned about the composition of the collection that the majority of the artworks in the collection are single-channel, but there are also some film-based artworks, software-based artworks, and even an audio artwork that we were previously unaware of. We know now exactly what formats our artworks are stored on, so this will prove to be really essential information for any future digitization project, as it informs us about what equipment needs to be sourced, and will also help this formula to budget for such a project. Really importantly, we identified the growing need for secure digital storage. We felt that it was really important to stress in the report that digital storage should be considered alongside our physical storage vaults, as they're both storing artworks. And through this process of investigating digital storage practices for time-based media at the Met, we found that these same issues applied to other high-value, non-art digital assets. So for example, we have so many performant after-treatment images, all of our x-rays. We also have educational videos that were created for the Tulio Conservation Project, 3D scans that are created by your imaging department, and our extensive archives and library collection, and all of these could benefit from improved digital storage practices. Our recommendations can be boiled down into four parts. The first is to increase staffing through the establishment of permanent positions for a time-based media conservator and a digital archivist, to create a trusted digital repository, which would safely store and monitor not only our time-based media artworks, but also our high-value, non-art digital assets. To build a time-based media conservation laboratory for use in the acquisition, condition assessment, and treatment of time-based media artworks, and the improvement of in-pals practices for the care of time-based media artworks in the collection. These recommendations were boiled down into two options, each with their own budget. So on the left, we have the priority option, and this addresses the time-based media artworks only. But we also offered a comprehensive option, and that addressed not only the time-based media artworks, but also the non-art digital assets as well. Building consensus in support of a new initiative can be really challenging at a place as large and as complex as the Met. However, there are two takeaways that we would like to leave you with. The first is that having someone on your team with access to upper administration is really key. The trust and respect that our department had Nora has built through the decades-long professional relationship that she's fostered has contributed to more rapid buy-in across the museum. The second important aspect in consensus building was those 45 interviews with key staff members. They were conducted by Glenn alone to promote an honest exchange of views. Light bulbs went off when staff in different departments understood how the documentation and other activities of time-based media conservation are deeply related to their own work as well. Once they understood this on a personal level, they were more likely to support the creation of a time-based media conservation program at the museum. In closing, I want to emphasize that we conservators are stepping out of our labs and our studios and are taking our rightful places amongst the decision makers. There, Farmer, we're sharing our division directly and having a more active role in its realization. It is only through this rise in status through clear communication, outreach, and advocacy that real progress can be made in the conservation of collections of all times. Our assessment team would like to acknowledge the following institutions and foundations in the completion of this project. Without their collaboration, this project would not have been a success. Good morning. I'm really pleased to be here and I'm really looking forward to our panel discussion. But before that, I just wanted to talk briefly about the concept of practitioner invisibility and how this might apply to conservation and in particular to the conservation of contemporary artworks. So in 1948, Max Friedlander wrote, the restorer carries out the most thankless of tasks. At best, their work is totally invisible. If they achieve good results, they join the doubtful company of foragers and if they fail, they join the despised ranks of art desecrators. Their expertise is invaluable. Their deficiencies are all too obvious. And this statement describes, in one sense, the kind of invisibility I'm discussing today. The notion of practitioner invisibility is the idea that practitioners, their work, their knowledge, expertise and intellectual contribution may be rendered invisible through their own practices and through the practices of others. Invisibility is an achieved identity. It's performed and enacted through the norms of professional practice and surrounding practices of recognition. The position of invisibility is generated through various practices on the part of the practitioner that obscure the nature of their own work and these work in concert with practices of others that fail to recognize and acknowledge or in fact actively obscure the nature of the practitioner's role. So what does invisibility mean in this sense? It denotes presence without recognition. It's the result of practices shaped by understandings of value. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponti's phenomenological inquiry on visibility and invisibility proposes that that which is visible is not determined by what we see but rather by the principles and frameworks according to which we see. The corollary of this is invisibility. The failure to see or recognize is also informed by these principles and frameworks. In practitioner visibility, these frameworks are the hierarchies of professional knowledge and value. I draw this concept of invisibility primarily from the field of translation studies and Lawrence Venuti's influential text on the translator's invisibility. Venuti describes invisibility in translation as an illusionistic effect of discourse that operates to conceal the numerous conditions under which a translation is made. Translators seek to make themselves invisible within the text and in many ways, a successful translation is one that obscures its own existence, giving the appearance that it is not in fact a translation but the original, presented unmediated. Norman Shapiro, a professor of literary translation describes it in this way. I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it's there when there are little imperfections. Scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn't be any. It should never call attention to itself. Within the dominant discourse of translation, a translator is rendered visible only through what is described as negative notice. Translations are noticed and commented on only by way of criticism to point out a technical error to note an awkward or unnatural phrasing or a failure to remain faithful to the source text. The effect of the position of invisibility in translation is twofold, however. What translators obscure is not only the text's translated nature but also the value and presence of their own work and contribution. Invisibility also has a significant instrumental value related to ideas of objectivity and subjectivity. If the translator is invisible in respect of the text, the original author retains more authority and their intent is more present to the reader. It's presented as direct and unmediated through the translator's gaze. If the translator is invisible, there is no question as to what influence their own subjective interpretation of the source text may have yielded. The notion of practitioner invisibility and the underlying reasons for adopting and perpetuating this professional identity has strong resonances with the traditional rhetoric of conservation. A commitment to accurately representing the expression or intent of someone else. The framing of this task in terms of truth or objectivity and a concern with making a work available to new and different audiences. In addition to this, assuming a position of invisibility may, for conservators, be in private practice, be essential for reasons of privacy or impact on commercial interests. So invisibility is something that the conservation profession has endeavored to achieve in respect of objects. To avoid the kind of negative notice described by Friedlander. But what are the implications of this in respect of other aspects of conservation practice? What else does practitioner invisibility occlude for the recognition of the epistemic aspects of conservation practice? Or in the perceived value of conservation in an institutional context or the contributions of the conservation profession to a broader public discourse? Practices that might contribute to practitioner invisibility in conservation include ways we negotiate authorship, acknowledgement, and credit. On Wednesday morning, after Sebel Tom's wonderful presentation, there was some discussion about the use of standardized language in documentation, which serves a really useful and valid purpose but also operates to obscure individual authorship and leaves little scope for describing subjective considerations. These practices of standardization, which are stressed as important in conservation training programs, operate to conceal the particular intellectual contribution and authorship of individual conservators, to conceal the elements of situatedness within their knowledge of the subjectivity and interpretation inherent in the production of that knowledge. And these practices thereby inform the surrounding practices of attribution and acknowledgment of this documentation by others who draw on it. Venuti observes in regards to translation that invisibility belies the complexity of the task and precludes it from being fully acknowledged as a knowledge generating activity. It can make the practice of translation appear purely mechanical, technical, and derivative rather than discursive and epistemic. Applying this reasoning to conservation, invisibility may have further implications for how conservation is viewed in professional and institutional contexts, wherein the discourse of invisibility informs status, acknowledgement, and recognition of value. The particular circumstances of contemporary art conservation present a challenge to this rhetoric of invisibility within conservation. The precarity of contemporary artworks when you are faced with rapid material degradation, instability, variability of form, technological obsolescence, and ephemerality render conservators' decisions and actions increasingly visible. As theories of conservation evolve from a framework of truth enforcement toward management of and facilitation of acceptable change, the conservator has become more visible in the contemporary art museum in relation to the work. But what then are the implications of this invisibility of conservation practice for the visibility of the conservation practitioner and their expertise within broader networks of research and knowledge both within and beyond their institutions? How does this inform a view of conservation as a knowledge-generating activity? I suggest that perhaps it makes clear the discursive, subjective, interpretive, and creative aspects of conservation practice. Rendering the conservator more visible in relation to the work of art and perhaps also provide scope to render visible the epistemic, interpretive, and discursive nature of conservation practice. Thank you very much. Are they on? Thank you for these really interesting presentations. I think the various roles a conservator can take on in different circumstances became quite clear. And I would like to use this moment to give Glenn Wharton and Nora the chance to become a part of this act of pen on. And I wanted to say that Glenn, as we all know, is the conservator of Objects and Types Media after 20 years in New York, working at MoMA and teaching in museum studies at NYU. He has recently accepted a professorship at the UCLA Gated Conservation Program with the Archaeological and Anthropographic Interiors and Nora, who's the Chairman and Chair of the Grand Challenge of the Conservator in Child and Photogram Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she's had the pleasure to work for the past 27 years. And I thought I would begin with you, Nora, to ask you about your personal experience within the institution of the Met and especially how you remember your initial position and role as a conservator, as a young conservator, and then throughout the years passing through the ranks and how you would see your position now and your influence within the institution. Sounds good. Yeah, good morning, everyone. Actually, when I gave you those notes, apparently my math skills are very poor because I began in 1990. So I apparently missed a few years. It's been so fun that I missed a few years along the road. I started at the Met in 1990 as the first photo conservator and I was brought into the paper conservation department. And then over the years, as the interest need for photograph conservation grew, my little area also grew and then a department was established in 2015. And I will say, probably you realize this, but that's a big deal. The Met doesn't form new departments very often. So the fact that our skills and that part of conservation was recognized enough to form a new department is pretty major. Having worked to establish that area of specialization, I've kind of taken it on myself to establish this other area, time-based media conservation. And again, it's not because I have any expertise in that area. On the contrary, Alex has been my teacher during her fellowship. But I saw a need, it seemed to have a relationship with photograph conservation and I saw that it was something that needed to be done. I hope that as a department head, the timeline is gonna be shorter, that we will be able to achieve the goal of having time-based media conservation in the museum, that that will happen more quickly. And I certainly, I would encourage all of you to be, if you're so inclined and not everyone is, to work toward leadership roles that basically take an interest in your institution as a whole, build strong professional relationships, advocate for conservation, be positive, be collaborative, be inclusive. Even if you're not inclined toward a leadership role, you really can advance the field and non-leadership positions. And I will say, my perspective is working in an institution, but for those of you in private practice, I think it's also very, very clear that you have a lot of impact on the field, on raising the respect for conservators. Raise your prices. Be able to talk about why your work is so important and so critical. Seize to be invisible or celebrate the invisibility. Be able to talk about that aspect of things. And finally, don't think your work will end once you're in a leadership position, right? Don't think, oh, yeah, I can rest on my laurels now. Basically, you're going to be advocating every single day of your life, if you choose to do that. So the work, it continues on. A phrase that I often repeat at the Met is, conservation has to become part of the fabric of the institution and that is your role working there. Thank you, Nora. And Glenn, would you do the same? Speak about your experiences in the various phases of your career from private practice to institutional, to educational, and then particularly what you see your role is now in your new role. How much time do we have? Five minutes. I'll make it quick, because I have so many questions for my fellow panelists here. Took a lot of notes during their presentations, but just reflecting most recently on my work establishing a time-based media conservation program at MoMA and then having the opportunity to work with a whole new set of colleagues at a very different institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And after hearing those 45 confidential responses to my interview questions at the Met, I have a whole other understanding, I think, of how conservation and time-based media not only sits within an institution and the fabric of the institution, but how it gets there. And I'll say just a couple of things. I've been thinking a lot about the conservation of contemporary art and its relationship to other fields or other specialties of conservation, because I'm working on this book for the Getty Conservation Institute of Readings and Conservation Book on the conservation of contemporary art. So I'm reading through the entire literature and selecting publications that I think are really important for others to read and will be excerpting them. And one of the major takeaways I've had through reading the literature is that this new field, time-based media conservation, but contemporary art more broadly, is being built on a foundation that's been developed over several hundred years at least of theory and practice. And I find in the literature we are referring back to that, the debates in the 19th century over restoration versus preservation and use and the values that regal laid out for us. And yet we're adapting them. So we're changing them to current needs, current materials, technologies, and conceptual intentions from artists. So it's been very interesting for me to read through all this literature and reflect on how the field is developing. And within the institution, when I left MoMA, my biggest question was about how changed happened at MoMA when I and others established this new division of conservation. And I knew I didn't have the skills or the knowledge to answer that question. So I partnered with a sociologist and Vivian Vonsaz, who some of you may know who's maybe described as a museum studies professor, but we decided to go back to MoMA and conduct interviews, perform ethnographic research and other methods of research to answer that question of institutional change. So we leveraged science and technology studies, STS theory and new institutionalism from sociology to look at how change was happening. And what we learned from our interviews and from other data, that it was really a process of adaption. It wasn't the radical change that it felt like when we were there, the new forms of documentation, the new practices, the new types of migration or managing change, but then looking back, we created another division of conservation. We developed maybe new forms of documentation, but we made it fit within systems and structures within the institution. So it felt a lot less radical after I stepped out and looked back. And I think at the Met now, as the people and departments are figuring out the needs and how time-based media conservation will sit within the museum, I'm already seeing the same process. It will be a process of adaption and institutional change, which is gradual rather than radical. I'm not sure I addressed your question, some of the things that came to mind on the larger level. And of course, as I said, have questions for my fellow panelists. Go ahead. What I found really striking in all of your presentations and Alex's is this importance of long-term relationships and building alliances and building trust in order to preserve art most efficiently or effectively. And I wanted to ask you, Mirozois, if you could speak a little bit more about your personal interaction with the artist and how you were able to gain his trust. And if I understand you correctly, during the phone conference call that we've had a few weeks ago, you were kind of implying that you were first downgraded to an assistant. And then as you were able to interact with the artist, you rose in his perception of you as a professional. Yeah, different things. Maybe first of all, it should be said that before none of the works of David Lynch were conserved. If something was done, a word artist refers. He didn't remember, because I asked him about it, that any of his works were professionally conserved. So probably in his mind world, there was no place for conservator. And it's not the case of thinking whether this is a good or bad profession. He didn't need a conservator. So I think this is the starting point. The other thing is that we already have some maybe standards or propositions, how to deal with artists, different models of interview making. There was totally no space for something like typical interview with such a person, as in this case a little bit a pop star as well. But many artists today, which deal with art market and has big prices, can also become a pop star, even not doing films. So, and there can be also other conditions that make us impossible to follow this traditional interview schedule. When I was dealing with the artist, he was, for example, with bodyguards when he was in Poland. There was never a time to be just alone with the artist. He really doesn't have time. Maybe it was not mentioned enough in the presentation, but a very important person is also artist assistant. And I had the fortune that one was really conscious and also conscious about technical things. He was buying materials for the artist. He knew what techniques he was using. So he was also conscious how important this can be, maybe not now until the artist can do all the work himself. But also when he will leave and there will be no more artists to do the job. So assistant was, of course, very important. But yes, I would stress that these social skills which are not implemented to our profession as an obvious thing, they become more and more important once the artist is alive. It is always a negotiation. What degree, if ever to do the conservation, first of all, if so, to what degree? What degree of engagement of artists? What degree of engagement of conservator? I think what was maybe crucial that my background is not only of conservator rights. So did a secondary art school and probably more interesting things that we are communicating with the artist during this first to controversial his interventions into the work or was that he gets some information on artistic or aesthetic solutions, what he can do better to achieve his aesthetic goals he want to achieve. The second part was conservation. Artists, I think, at the very first step probably don't care so much about at least contemporary artists in quite a big number. They don't care too much about conservation, preservation, sustaining the work. Maybe until the moment it is sold and his client is expecting that once he paid thousands of dollars or something he want to keep it in a pristine condition. When the artist or his assistant has to warn himself about, okay, so what can I do that my client doesn't get disappointed? But the artist himself, so I would say this possibility maybe to propose him, for example, for him, as it was, I hope, expressed he did consolidation. He called it this consolidation so it was not my word to use it. But the task was done for esthetical reasons more than just to say few flakes. At the very end, when after this whole process of emails and finally meeting with the artist, when he, like, told, I will recommend you now as my conservator, he also expressed, but you know, I don't care so much that one flake will be broken if it's too stiff once you are attaching this. Behind these words was it is more important that they are not going to be too glossy or that there will be glossy in one part, in the other there will be semi-glossy and in the other there will be mud. And for him keeping this, and if I could give him a support, okay, you can do this and this way and it still will be safe, reversible and you can achieve your goal. Yeah, this was starting to be interesting for him, but only if I could connect it with his artistic aesthetic goals, not only the conservation ones. Yeah, and this, sorry, go ahead. Sir, I'm talking quite long, but maybe one important thing, I think I'm coming from the painting conservation background. And once artist is dead, we have the feeling that we are ruling the situation, that we have the best knowledge, we have the best experience, so it's quite easy to become a teacher for an artist. If we start with this attitude, it will never work, but if we start with the attitude that it's the conservator who is in the service of the work of art and it is written in the traditional code of ethics. So if we service work of art, we service also the artist. So if we give him the first step and then to listen to him and later to maybe subtle express the conservation needs, then maybe it will work. Thank you very much. I think, sorry, is this better? I wanted to also address the conservator among stakeholders, and of course that is Marta. What I find really striking is, sorry. I was wondering how you would place the conservator within the stakeholders that stick for the institutional setting for a moment. Where is the... What makes the conservator different from the other stakeholders, like the museum board or the curator or the artist or the assistants? I always wonder about that. So I think that in my case, I'm presenting the figure of the conservator as the agent of change, but I don't think that it has to be fixed because I think that having the conservator as this person in the middle, it's great because you have someone that is trained in preservation matters, but probably also in art history. So I have a background in fine art and photography. So I study artists and the production and the feeling of what the artist might want. But then you have a second training in conservation. So what's the stability of the material? What's the museum expectations? And I also think that it's not just about your training. And I think that it's about your personal capacities and your human aspect. So if you are a person that is open to dialogue and discussion and to listen to others and be a little bit quiet and understanding their goals and their interests, and then you kind of analyze that and you go to a different person and listen to their interests and their goals and come back and try to reach an agreement between them. I think that that's the way. And in my case, I feel that the conservator could fit in that perspective. Also because I think that the position of the conservator is developing, at least contemporary art conservators. When I finished my training, I was quite well trained in chemistry and treatment and science, but I wasn't trained in thinking. I wasn't trained in listening and reaching a consensus like playing the risk. And I think that contemporary art conservators are being trained in this critical thinking and moving into decisions. Does it answer the question? Yeah, it does. And so what I was thinking is that the artist and the conservator both have this deep material knowledge about an artwork and Miroslav had just explained how he gained more and more access to information about the artwork. And so in my imagination, for the time the artist is around, this person is kind of the authority and the conservator can assist or they can start a collaboration and co-produce, like Nina said. But then once the artist is gone, there's this gap of authority. And I wonder who and how to fill that moment because it happens more and more in contemporary art that artists are aging or no longer accessible. Yes, they are going through life. Like the artworks and how. What I can speak of my personal experience with the cases I researched during NACA and that was a three-year project with few cases study. So I don't think that that can be put in perspective with the whole number of artworks in the real world. There is a collaborative work and it's a process that it doesn't have an end. I think that artwork had a past and they have a future and they are associated with the momentum in which we live. So for me, as a conservator, when I attempted to research my case studies, I first identified the important people that could talk about the biography and the anatomy of the artwork. The ones that could tell me what this artwork means, what the materials are. So I went to the curator and I went to the conservator and I went to the artist and by talking to them, I realized like, yeah, but you don't know about that. So I went to the printing lab because the printing lab notes about that. And then they spoke out the frame and I was like, ooh, the framer knows more. So I think that it's by collecting this information. I think that Brian spoke about that at some point, I don't know if during these days or the NACA project. The artwork is not just the artwork, the artwork is the artwork plus all the information about the artwork. And the artwork will be seen different in different contexts of time. So. But is it then, so the way you describe your case, it sounds like you were the one initiating all the connections of like approaching the curator. That was a fun story. Yes, the reason why I reached this agreement is because in my first attempt to collect information from different stakeholders, I put in the same room the artists, the conservator, the curator and the printing lab and me as a researcher, and it went sidewise. It went like, they couldn't understand each other because the artist is worried about not having too much information of these artworks being reproduced in the public because it will have an influence in the price of his artworks. The curator wants to maintain the aesthetic aspect. It was a shiny print. But the conservator believes in the materiality, the history of the material, and you are in the middle and things happen. Yeah, so I wanted to bring up, and maybe to all of you, so this. But I'm sure there are great teams. Maybe that was just my case, so. I keep stumbling over this idea or this notion that sometimes is found in literature that the conservator needs to mediate and the conservator as the mediator in the decision process, because I think the mediator is not participating in the decision-making process. So this is like a paradox. If you mediate, then you shouldn't act. But as a conservator, you need all these kinds of information so you automatically gain that role, and I wonder if that's an issue or not, or how curators see that. Any curators here? Or other people, not necessarily conservators? I am. Okay. Can I ask? I think that even if you are mediating, you cannot ever make the decision. And I think it really depends on the situation who is making the last decision. What is crucial is that it's team decision-making nearly always. But the funny thing is also that very often I had the feeling that once it comes to the moment that curator doesn't know what to do, so the last person to put it on is the conservator. But it's also even the artist. I have maybe another case to bring it here. I was a part once again at the beginning of assisting the process that a team of four artists got a gift from the other artists, it was in Poland, and it was quite ironic group. They were playing with things, doing performances, and what they wanted to do was to cut the painting they got into four equal pieces. And there was a leader of this group, he had an idea for this, and they wanted to exhibit it in a way to show that there are four equal porters, but they are still able to be shown separately. And his idea was to nail the canvas, front of the canvas to something which is under this. It was obvious that after two weeks it will be totally deformed of humidity and so on. So I was in correspondence with him how we can make a different way maybe to make a lining. And I was proposing transparent lining using plexiglass. So funny thing was to find out that for him plexiglass was something artificial, but lining not at all. It wasn't changing the originality of the work. A lot of things are lined so it's okay. But so we prepared the work to be durable. There was sandwich lining to make the surface more stiff and so on, and another solution, so I don't want to go to technical stuff. What was funny at the very end, the group gathered, there was a film for documentation. There was a nice photo before. They are in a white gloves to make the ironical atmosphere even higher, but at the very end, even artists wanted conservator to make the final cut. And because they didn't want to make it at the very end. And there was another work by Osmowowski. It was a kind of installation with lettering with sentences made on the museum walls with the dust. And artists was not coming. So once again, who is going to do this? Maybe we'll take some students or find out faculty. No, at the very end it was the conservator to make the work which is for sure crossing boundaries of aesthetics, because how much of the dust and all of these little questions which comes out once you start to do the thing, which is in a way artistic part of doing the job. But once you don't know what to do, yeah, let's call conservator. That's a lot of my experience, at least in the contemporary art. I think that is a very nice bridge to Zoe and her really fantastic talk about the invisibility of the conservator. Why, if the conservator is so important, are they so invisible? Well, what's your experience? Or what is your, no, not experience, observation. My observation, I think that in the art world in general, the idea of authorship is so important and wanting to present a work as authored by the artist. The role of the conservator in making any kind of intervention in that work or making any kind of change renders that kind of position a bit uncomfortable because you are interfering in some way between the artist and the audience. This kind of mediating role of the conservator is not only between people, but between the work and the viewer. And I think that is what makes people uncomfortable with recognizing the, yeah, that kind of interference. And that's why it's not talked about more broadly, I think. There is not like a broader public discourse around what conservation does and doesn't do, particularly in the conservation of contemporary art because there is a greater degree of intervention. There's also a greater degree of change of the works themselves. I have a question probably for Zoe, but maybe for anyone on the panel. Zoe, I'm particularly interested in your thinking because you are the only non-conservator here, yet you've had this deep immersion in conservation over the last three years of NACA and being embedded at the Tate. And so it's very interesting to me that you came up with this framework of invisibility and you related it to the field of translation, which I've also been thinking a lot about. But then in the context of this discussion of the conservator as the mediator or the conservator who gains trust and then as a central actor, as well as mediator in this research and decision-making, curious just about your thoughts. And I also think that the conservator in the collaboration is often the person with the eye on the past and the future of the work and a very strong sense of ethics that they bring up in discussions. I'm wondering if you have a thought about not expanding your framework of invisibility but maybe sort of digging deeper or I think it's more complicated than just being invisible. There's a lot of roles that conservators are playing. I think the ethical framework of conservation is really interesting because of the degree to which it can kind of dictate the position of invisibility. But beyond that as well I think it's really important and I'm not sure if I've been clear enough that I don't necessarily think that invisibility of a conservator in relation to a work is not necessarily a bad thing. You are this kind of facilitative role between enabling an artist to present their intended work to the audience is an incredibly valuable thing and doesn't necessarily need the role of the conservator in that doesn't necessarily need to be acknowledged in the public discourse in relation to a particular work. But more broadly I think a surrounding critical discourse and a surrounding academic discourse around the work of conservation and its value and its impact, particularly in the contemporary art world, is really valuable and would ultimately enhance the kind of ethical framework that would inform responsible discussions around conservation. Are there any more questions among each other? Yes. I had a question related to this that it's just to hear your opinion or someone's opinion because I find that so if we think into the lectures, the presentations we have on the first day, we have a beautiful one about preserving nirvana and it's this whole idea of making conservation visible to the whole public. So the public gets engaged and they learn about conservation and what we do and actually it elevates the position of the field of conservation. So I have the feeling that we are winning visibility in the conservation field, but when you are with contemporary art works that are supposed to keep being shiny so they don't lose value, economic value, so their monetary value is maintained, those are the treatments that you want to render invisible. Those are the ones where you have to cut in words in documentation. So it seems that in the same field we have two lines. We want conservation to be more visible and to be acknowledged, but there are certain artworks that we don't want to speak about. So it's... Yeah, I mean there's definitely attention and particularly for works that aren't part of an institutional collection, works that might still go to market. And there are other ethical considerations that inform the decision not to make public any information about those kinds of treatments. I think, Marta, what you were talking about like the idea of like a broader understanding of conservation within, not only within institutions but within the public discourse is a really valuable thing and only really gets difficult when you are discussing particular works. So in translation theory, the idea of invisibility was talked about at a critical and academic level about 15, 20 years ago and has sort of entered the field of translation theory since then. But in the last five to 10 years, there's also been a new growing body of work of translators' own sort of writings, like personal writings, memoirs about what it means to them to translate and what kind of theories they draw in and what kind of things they agonize over and despair over and think about when they're translating and how this informs their own work. And I think that is the kind of broad of critical discourse that could be really valuable in terms of conservation but not necessarily have to address a particular work with particular ethical issues attached to it. Can I just make a little comment? So it's, I think that is to me, you have an incredible knowledge in legal matters and copyrights, at least in the case of reproduction. It's really important. Different legal aspects are different in every country from the European to America so they actually have an impact in our conservation process. And I was wondering if there is any aspect such as, for example, in books, when they are after 85 years, you are allowed to read them online or to download them or images. You can use them for publications. But if they are really young, you have all these copyrights and legal backup areas. Is that somehow influencing our conservation treatments with contemporary artworks? Is there someone in the museum that runs these conservation approaches in the legal aspect, I mean? I mean, influencing the treatment or influencing discussions about the treatment? Telling you you cannot do that because then we will have to go to court. Yeah, well, I mean, I think there are obviously like myriad intellectual property issues that inform conservation decisions, but that's also an ethical issue. The, there are, I mean, in the U.S. there's VARA, which has been discussed a lot in the last couple of days. But ultimately, I think the conservation field probably gives VARA greater power in a rhetorical sense than it has an illegal sense. Like the idea that there is a statute saying the integrity of the work is important is a really powerful rhetorical tool within conservation, even if it has a much more limited effect in its sort of legal sense. So I think that relates back actually to just the idea of professional ethics more generally and maintaining good relationships with the artist, which I think is probably the paramount consideration as well as with owners and collectors. And I would like to open the discussion to the public now or to the audience, I'm sorry, but I'm so much about the public. Yeah, and I also just wanted to ask you not necessarily assuming that you have an answer to it, but I just wanted to throw out who owns conservation knowledge. I think that's a complicated question. Yes. It depends on so many factors. It's complicated by institutional considerations, employment contracts dictate that intellectual property generated by employees often is owned by their employer. But in a non-legal sense, I think it has just as much power because recognizings that someone has knowledge gives them social capital and acknowledges their professional value. So I think conservators own conservation knowledge, but I think they don't necessarily always claim it. And that is something that I think is a result of this sort of the invisibility, this sort of commitment to being invisible is you don't make yourself known. Thank you. Are there any questions? I saw some heads. Go ahead. So I wanted to come back to something that I think Zoe and Marta kind of were both speaking about in terms of authorship. We, in contemporary art, modern contemporary art, I mean, one of the legacies of contemporary art is the idea of delegated fabrication, delegated performance and delegated fabrication. And the idea that the artist makes everything is gone, right? So I'm curious why we then still have this hesitancy to acknowledge conservation as delegated fabrication. Looking at Nina's talk yesterday, I mean, she was essentially a fabricator with a background in conservation and knowledge around materials and concepts and ideas. And I think I've talked to you about this too, Zoe, but the idea of even a film, like if you wanna think of a David Lynch film, right? It's David, it's his film and no one would deny that, but obviously there's hundreds or thousands of people who made it. So yeah, in terms of rendering authorship visible, I just... Well, I think film is a great example because a David Lynch film, everyone knows is a David Lynch film. But at the end of that David Lynch film, there are credits and they acknowledge the contribution that all the different people on that film made to the work. And people are still comfortable with that. I think people aren't necessarily comfortable with that for a work of art and unless it is a film. But I think that's a really interesting model for thinking about being able to recognize someone as the artistic author of a work and also recognize others for making an important and significant contribution. As well as the ongoing authorship of the work with the creative interpretive work of conservation, among others, what role does conservation documentation have on the future life of the work? And I'm thinking within the institutional framework but also within the private framework about the kind of documentation that private conservators are creating and whether or not that lives along with the work in the future. This is more of a provocation for more questions from the audience. Can I just jump in there real quick and make sure that everyone knows that there is a recent something along those lines where, sorry, Adam Novak, private conservation in New York City where they are using, there's a database that's just been formed in the last, if anyone remembers what this is called, remind me, it starts with an A. Anyway, it's about artwork following the object. The owners, so it's going through provenance, it's also, it does have section four conservation, although that's not really publicized, I don't think. But it's going through the owners, it's going through exhibits, it's going through all of that stuff. Yeah, is that maybe the linked, I don't know if... It was reported in the Art Market 2018 economic report, so you can go there to see that. You have to look it up, thank you. So I have a question for Maraica Zoe Martin, probably the second part for Nora. You talked about the authority gap within the stakeholder kind of universe and I come from private practice and it's more often than not that we can't even identify who the stakeholders are before we have to complete the project. And as prices increase with certain values of artworks, we're actually prevented from knowing who the real owners are and having access to either the artist's studio or the client. And in those situations, I wanted to hear what would your suggestions be on how to react to those situations? Because I live this almost every day and we have to often rely on our own kind of... internal moral compass on AIC ethics that we like to kind of use as a firewall. But I'm realizing that my approach to a lot of things differs from my colleagues and we all work for the same company. We have to kind of prevent or present a unified front. And the flip side of that question is how would you say good conservation outcomes are judged, especially in private practice? Because in the museum world, you have curators, you have collection managers and you do have this whole kind of system of feedback. But in private practice, often the only feedback is an auction result or if something sells. And that is often not even related to the actual condition. So those are just like two part questions. Yes, exactly. And I think I could just pass on the word straight to Julie and Martha. Because Martha said that... I'm blanking now. So that in private practice, and you often only have one stakeholder or two, the conservator and the owner or the representative of the owner, or sometimes it's the insurance and sometimes you have the artist around as well. And you need to kind of feel from behind the scenes, that's Martha, from behind the scenes what the aim of the conservation is and what is going to happen with the artwork in the next spot or in the next phase. Because oftentimes this is the moment when the artwork changes owners. So the human inactive stakeholder is the new owner and the active stakeholder is the present owner or person in charge. And I've seen in Julie's cases in conservation, she's a colleague of mine and also part of Ken. She's dealt with a number of artworks where she had either the artist present or not present. And these conditions affected our discussions within the studio quite a bit. And yeah, I don't know. How about you? Luca. I think that I have never been working, I mean I have done bits and bobs in private practice but always working for someone who will somehow dictate what is expected from us. But I believe that the expectations are totally different and the ones you have in institution and as much as you want to follow the same course of ethics, it's a different environment. It's a totally, totally different environment. And I think that we have to make peace with that. We have to make peace to the, accepting for whom we are working. And we are working under my point of view, we are working for the objects. We will die. The collectors will die. The objects will stay. So by making happy the collector of the owner, if you have information, because as you mentioned yesterday, maybe you don't even know who they are, you cannot talk to them. But by knowing where the artworks are going to be living, how can you make sure that they will be healthy? The healthiest because I know that in an institution the artwork is going to be in cold storage and it's going to have, you know, third time amount of hours of like the exposure and it will travel in perfect conditions. So I don't need to design a super great crate, but you know the conditions of your framework. And I think that we have to acknowledge that and we have to acknowledge, Brian was also mentioning this yesterday from Helia Marcel, we have to acknowledge what we don't know because not knowing it's knowing something. So you already have a card there of, I don't have this information, I will never get this information. So I'm going to acknowledge that and move my decision from that point onwards. And I'm thinking that you people in private practice are an example because you have to take lips of faith every day and it's kind of a scary. And yeah, and I suppose that in the teamwork, just by talking and discussing, what's your plan? You've been in private practice more, what do you? Well, I mean, I'll just interject one thing because I mean, Luca, I know for sure that you guys have contacted me and I have contacted you. If we have holdings and you know that and we may have had contact with the artist, but vice versa, you all in private practice have developed very strong relationships with certain artists. So I'm often on the phone to you saying, ah, what do we do in this case? Yeah, so I mean, that kind of collaboration is very obvious, we're really trying to help each other. And I'll just add to with regard to the invisibility, visibility to me that honestly that doesn't, it's not a conflict, you know, it's still my job to make conservation work visible. There's some things you know, you have to think about every category and sometimes you have to talk to a lawyer or the communications department and say, is this okay to talk about? And you know, just related to that, I find myself sometimes in a position of, I mean, it's like the emperor's new clothes, right? You're looking at this piece that looks the same before and after treatment and you have to somehow make up the story about how much better it is. And yeah, it is like that old fairy tale. Christian, I saw you had a question. Oh, sorry. It's fine, I was just, you know, you just mentioned me working with a lot of living artists and having to make decisions in cases where the living artist is around and sometimes when the artist is not around then maybe that, you know, when you were asking where, or you know, look at the thing about getting feedback, it's also when the artist is around and your decision, like the artist approves your decision or like is kind of part of the decision making is just comforting, you know, because you have the feeling that the artist is, you know, stands behind your doing and your decisions and your treatment. And I feel like that's maybe some sort of feedback we're getting within, yeah, conservation, I don't know. But it doesn't have to be positive feedback. But the process is very complicated. I like to go back to the case that is because we show like the glue. So another case that there was an installation with plasticine sculptures and they were stolen. And the artist was alive and he was even younger than me, so no problem to recreate this. But he didn't want to. He wanted the conservator to make the reconstruction and it was an exhibition of only one installation. So curator really insisted, let's do it and do it fast and there were materials to do this in a proper way. So at the very end, yeah, I was struggling a lot and I hope I did a satisfying work but the artist was not satisfied but he implemented this into work and the work was exhibited. So it can be really, really complex. So I would say that being a contemporary conservator of the artist who is alive is a great advantage but it doesn't mean that it's always a nice and comfortable situation. And once again, maybe coming still because this visibility and visibility, I think, yeah, it's very, very interesting but I would say that as always, I think it's like coming back because of what become visible or not and as it was said already, the work itself is most important and it's integrity and sometimes because of originality, integrity, authenticity of the work we shouldn't be invisible because I think it was in one of the Glenn Papers a good example of Namjoon Paik if I pronounce well his name when the monitor was exchanged into a different one and there was an information below that it is exchanged and it was information from the conservator but this information was showing something about also authenticity of the work that not the monitor, the screen was so important that it's not so old anymore and it's replaced with more modern one because the value of the work was like somewhere else. So being visible, for example, in this case was also raising the visibility what is really meaning original in the case of this exact object. Yeah, I wanted to thank everybody at the panel because I think everybody has a really interesting perspective on the role of the conservator so it's very well chosen participants. What made me think of Muruslaw's presentation was actually, I realized then when you speak about the relationship between the conservator and the artist is that probably the dynamics in conservation comes into play as soon as there is a collector with it because the artist often does not care, does not mind so much the condition but it's more the collector who is like on top of this triangle probably that is concerned about some processes that they don't understand, they cannot direct, they cannot control and that's why they want conservation. But in the other aspect in your presentation I found interesting the role of the conservator. We recently had a case where like an artwork was declared a total loss and the gallery asked us to destroy the work and send photos to the artist and then we said that's a great idea but conservators don't destroy artworks and that makes it really interesting what are we actually doing and because it's almost like a work or a ritual is sanctioned if it is done by a conservator it's almost like the priest has given his approval or her approval to a work but we cannot produce these services which is I think very interesting to understand what we do, what we not do and then towards Zoë's talk about the invisibility we often find that in museums conservation is much more discussed openly and in private conservation especially when a work is being prepared for a show or for an auction it's very discreet and you cannot talk about it and so like this celebration of an artist of a conservator or a conservation in general is it has like very different events like sometimes it's very well celebrated in other cases the same tear that has been closed you cannot even speak about it but what I like about the invisibility and also I like to speak about invisibility which is very interesting is the intimacy between you and the artwork and the invisibility probably improves the intimacy between the conservator and the artwork I think that's really interesting and I'm going to talk more about that with you later so I don't want to I don't want to if I can add maybe last thing about invisibility another last case but this time from translation field we had a really good translator of Shakespeare works and he totally was not invisible he was visible and since he made much more modern translation of Shakespeare with the width that you could feel in the sentences and so on it started to be played much more in Polish theatres and it was not falsifying the originality of the text but the translator was really visible there's a whole topic that I would like to open up but we can't because we're at the end of the session or just about so maybe I'll just bring it up and suggest that it could be a topic for a future session of Cannes which is the relationship of documentation that private conservators as well as museums conservators create and the relationship it has in the future with the work of art as the work continues to live and be reinstalled, reinstantiated but also moves from one environment and one owner to another I think it's just a really fascinating topic because it's the relationships that conservators have with artists and the artworks and other stakeholders can result in really deep understanding of the works themselves and I fear that a lot of the documentation is lost particularly from the private within the private sphere of private collectors but that's maybe a topic for another conference another day I'll make it another conference, yes thank you everybody for joining this panel discussion I hope you enjoyed it and I think we need a coffee